How You Can Tune Out Office Blues And Leave Work At Work

Personal health

October 29, 1991|By Robert Brody, Health & Fitness News Service

So there you go again, heading home after work, dragging your office behind you. All the meetings, all the phone calls, all the deadlines have created a roller-coaster momentum. Now your head throbs from the pressure of some workplace crisis you imagine will emerge tomorrow.

Chances are, the minute you walk in your front door, you'll feel like putting your day on instant replay for your spouse. You'll reenact how Mike in marketing criticized your report, or what your secretary whispered about Caroline in R&D. And before you know it, you'll be up to your eyeballs in shoptalk. It will seem as if you never left your office in the first place.

Sound familiar?

Five days a week, you and your spouse - like millions of other two-career couples - discover that coming home at night may represent a special challenge. Entering that front door, you stand poised on a precarious seesaw between your professional and personal lives. And if you're going to assume your proper roles as spouse and parent, it's important, at least for a while, for you to leave your work behind.

''It's critical that you downshift as you settle in at home,'' says Bruce Baldwin, Ph.D., a psychologist and author of It's All In Your Head: Lifestyle Management Strategies for Busy People. ''If you bring all your office pressures home, then you go back to work the next day without any relief.''

''If your workday never really ends, you're contaminating your leisure time,'' says Beverly Potter, Ph.D., an organizational psychologist and author of Preventing Burnout. ''It can undermine your health, erode your relationships and diminish the general quality of your life. You need to change modes and clear your mind of work - just set it aside, let it go.''

The answer to this widespread syndrome is a system of ''decompression,'' according to Ira D. Glick, Ph.D., a psychiatry professor at Cornell University Medical College in Ithaca, N.Y. Just as deep-sea divers must decompress on surfacing from the ocean depths to relieve internal air pressure, so, too, should you learn to pass through your own homemade decompression chamber when you arrive home to avoid getting the bends.

More specifically, you need to establish a ''transition time'' immediately after work, Baldwin advises.

''You should establish a regular routine. If you do, you can refresh yourself within 20 to 30 minutes. But remember: Do it every day, however you feel. This ritual will come in especially handy on those days when it's really tough to shake the office out of your mind.''

Of course, only you can decide on the best decompression techniques to follow, Potter says.

''It can consist of anything, as long as it relaxes you. You and your spouse might want to discuss it with each other, to tailor a routine to your individual personalities.''

If practical, stay clear of dramatic subjects, such as family (''By the way, I've decided my mother should move in with us'') or current events (''Have you heard about the heat-seeking missiles headed for our county seat?''). Certainly you should arrange to review your day together, but also set a cut-off time.

Once you've fully decompressed, unleashing your internal air pressure, you'll most likely get a second wind. You and your spouse will find yourselves coming together after dinner with the special sweetness of a reunion, as you've taken a 30-minute vacation. No longer in a hurry, you'll finally be ready to take your time. After all, you'll have all night together.

(Robert Brody is a New York-based writer, specializing in health and medicine topics.)